He helped make movies an institution, so maybe it’s only right that Charlie Chaplin should get the Tinseltown treatment in a new stage musical.

But the kind of Hollywood gloss that “Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin” puts on the pioneering comic does more to burnish the icon than it does to help an audience understand the man.

The show, which just opened a world-premiere run at La Jolla Playhouse, boasts an inspired Chaplin in Rob McClure, who has the physical-comedy chops to bring Charlie’s signature Little Tramp character to vivid life.

The young composer-lyricist-writer Christopher Curtis and his co-writer, the Broadway pro Thomas Meehan (“Hairspray,” “Annie”), also come up with some workable motifs to help tie together the sprawling story, which stretches from Chaplin’s tough boyhood in Victorian London to his post-Hollywood life in the last half of the 20th century.

But the show, which breezes along on Curtis’ melodic if not especially adventurous score (performed in high style by music director/conductor Bryan Perri’s orchestra), seems content with confirming much of what we already know about the man beneath the bowler. “Limelight” is better at laying out the troubles that roiled Chaplin’s life than it is at revealing, in an authentic way, how they affected him.

There certainly was no shortage of pain along Chaplin’s path. His father died a drunk; his mother, Hannah (played in “Limelight” by the sweet-voiced Ashley Brown, who also portrays Chaplin’s fourth wife, Oona O’Neill), was a performer who struggled with mental illness.

Charlie and his brother, Sydney, wound up fending for themselves in a workhouse — an episode whose re-creation in “Limelight” is sabotaged by the mustache-twirling villainy of the place’s caretakers.

Warren Carlyle and Michael Unger, credited as the show’s co-directors (Carlyle took over after Unger parted ways with the production during rehearsals), don’t seem eager to push into the darker corners of Chaplin’s story. It registers as a bit baffling, then, when their central character suddenly laments (in the song “Vaudeville Dream”) that “I wish I could be someone else, someone other than me” — just as all his wishes are beginning to come true.

The directors do have a way with scenes that illuminate the origins of their subject’s art. A number called “Look At All The People” is a lyrical evocation of Hannah’s lessons for Charlie on how to dream up characters by observing people on the street. Another scene has the young Charlie and Sydney (played with understated appeal by Matthew Scott) toying with a fatuous cop; the way Charlie makes a comic prop of a stolen loaf of bread presages the Tramp’s famously versatile cane.

Alexander Dodge's sets, Paul Gallo's lighting and Linda Cho's richly detailed costumes provide satisfying period texture, and the show's 20-plus-member ensemble is solid throughout. Brooke Sunny Moriber is especially effective in a small role as Chaplin's first wife, Mildred, showcasing supple and fluttery vocals. Young Jake Evan Schwenke is poised and strong-voiced as the childhood version of Charlie. (It's also heartening to see the ace San Diego actors Kurt Norby and Courtney Corey back on the Playhouse stage, each in multiple roles.)

Given the scope of Chaplin’s life and work, it’s inevitable that things would get left out of “Limelight,” although it’s still a surprise that the show (which salts in a few film clips and presents the striking image of Charlie stepping into the screen) all but omits mention of such classics as “City Lights,” “The Gold Rush” and “Modern Times.”

But the most deafening silence is on details of Chaplin’s romantic life. Three of his wives were teenagers when he married them (two were just 16); Chaplin was 54 when he married the 18-year-old O’Neill. As it happens, the only Chaplin wife not mentioned in the show is also the one who was out of her teens (though not by much) when they apparently married; Paulette Goddard, who starred in "Modern Times."

You don’t have to be a prude or Victorian moralist to wonder why the show is so coy about those facts (there’s a single passing mention of a “teenage bride,” and another vague reference to a marital “controversy” decades after Charlie and Oona are wed). Backlash over those and other relationships, after all, played an important role in Chaplin’s exile from the U.S. shortly after the 1952 release of the film that gives this musical its name. It wasn’t all the fault of the red-baiting gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (portrayed here by Broadway veteran Jenn Colella with hard-edged, expertly sung brio).

That kind of soft-shoeing around the truth (no slight intended to Carlyle’s solid choreography for the show) doesn’t seem worthy of Chaplin’s complex story. The man may have been Hollywood royalty, but in “Limelight,” the Tramp can get trumped by showbiz mythmaking.